Late Night Meme: Stuff I Have That You Probably Don't

Just saw this on my friend Elaine's page, and I can't resist, even though it's supposed to be based on a "Friends List," and since this is a blog, this makes the whole thing basically unconfirmable.

Name a CD you have that you think no one else on your Friends List has. Situational Ethics, by rap duo 3582. I bought it thinking, "I wonder why I've never heard of these guys." Now I know.

Name a book you have that you think no one else on your Friends List has.  Since I often steal oddly-titled books when they're being unfairly used as decoration in restaurants, I have a huge list of these, but I'll go with Six Nuns and a Shotgun by Colin Watson.  (Unless my earlier blogpost about it caused someone to buy it online or something...)

Name a movie/DVD you have that you think no one else on your Friends List has.  I own a fair number of sort-of-obscure old movies (The Narrow Margin, The Man Who Cheated Himself, The Invisible Boy, Midnight), but I'm going to take a gamble and go with Man With the Movie Camera, an experimental Russian film from 1929 that has no plot and no dialogue; just images and music, sort of the ur-Koyaanisqatsi.  I had it loaned to me by someone who moved away before I could return it, and I find the music occasionally soothing.  I don't know what anyone else's excuse might be.

A Meme Observed

My friend Josh forwarded me a meme that is a variant of one that I've blogged about before. But I'm picking it up this time precisely because his own post is such a hard act to follow. The meme itself is simple:

1. Pick up the nearest book.
2. Turn to page 123.
3. Skip the first five complete sentences.
4. Post the next three sentences.
5. Tag five people, and acknowledge who tagged you.

The meme itself, precisely because it's so goddamned random, is unlikely to produce good results unless you tweak it. But as an occasion for writing about whatever it is you're reading, it's quite handy, and Josh's meme entry is simply amazing, and I want everyone to read it: it will change forever how you think about Anthony Trollope.

So, with this example raising the bar, I proceed. Since I have a history of tweaking memes, let me start by changing the rules a bit:

1. Pick up the nearest book that seems likely to produce an interesting result. And feel free to go through as many books as you need to until you do. No one wants dull sentences.
1.5 Tell us what book it is (title and author) and why you have it. (Duh.)
...
5. Tag no more than five people, and acknowledge who tagged you. And choose, as taggees, people who either read interesting books or have interesting things to say about dull ones. Again--why pollute the blogosphere with duds?

I suppose we could add the further caveat that it ought to be a book that you have read at least 123 pages of, so that you can add helpful context in case it's not clear to the virgin reader. (Josh's post does this wonderfully.) But I can imagine good results from not doing this, so I won't press that subclause too hard.

To be honest, the closest book I at hand led to this selection:

On a good day, we might make clumsy havdalah candles or faded sukkah garlands, but these never managed to sustain my interest. They were dusty and colorless, lacking the spangly appeal of the things I made at home. I was, however, quite taken with the sixth-grade sugar cube Masada.

--Jennifer Traig, Devil in the Details: Scenes from an Obsessive Girlhood, p. 123 (New York: Little, Brown 2004)

This is a book I picked up when I was making the rounds of publishers. Turns out the editors just hand books to you, and I'm laden with all sorts of promising goodies. I picked up this one first because it was the shortest. And, to maintain my coyness, I cannot tell you whether this is the publisher I went with or not. I will tell you, however, that the book is really really fun, and I hope she writes a lot more. As this excerpt shows, although it's technically a memoir of her struggle with obsessive-compulsive disorder, she's just as entertaining when she's writing about Jewish summer camp, dinner conversation, and pretty much anything else.

But since that doesn't lead me to any actual commentary, I thought I'd cheat and pull a threefer, using a trio of books I've blogged about before: In His Steps (1896), What Would Jesus Do?: In Which A New Generation Attempts to Walk In His Steps (1950), and In His Steps Today (1987). (My earlier blogs on the topic are here and here.) As I've mentioned before, the three books, written at a large temporal remove from each other, each deal with the same basic Christian concept--what would happen if people really did try to live like Jesus demands?--and each comes to intriguingly different conclusions. But it struck me in looking over my previous posts that I've never actually quoted at length from the later two books. (It also struck me that I never actually wrote the article. Books get in the way like that.) Obviously, each one should give a sense of the writing style and the concerns of the author, and I thought some of you all might be interested. So here are the books, in chronological order, three sentences each from the middle of their 123rd pages:

“And then the evangelist asked them all to bow their heads while he prayed. I was obliged in order to catch my train to leave during the prayer, and the last view I caught of the service as the train went by the shops was a sight of the great crowd pouring out of the tent and forming in open ranks while the coffin was borne out by six of the women. It is a long time since I have seen such a picture in this unpoetic Republic.”

--Charles M. Sheldon, In His Steps, p. 123 [1896] (Uhrichsville, OH: Barbour, 1993)

This is the end of an article written by an unbelieving reporter in Chicago who is covering the death of Loreen, a woman from the church who has taken The Pledge (as they call it), and has started to work and live among the alcoholics of skid row. Devil Liquor (or possibly Dumb Old John Barleycorn) led some crazy person to kill her, and suddenly the secular world at large begins to take notice. You can see that even journalism itself has really changed since 1896. (Sheldon was a newspaper editor for a time, so he knew what he was talking about here.)

Then aloud: “Peter stands for Faith; James for Hope, John for Love. Faith calls the signals, Hope is the right halfback who clears the way, Love is the left halfback who carries the ball, and Christ behind them all is the fullback or tailback or whatever you call the key man who usually makes the touchdowns.”

--Glenn Clark, What Would Jesus Do?, p. 123. (St. Paul, MN: Macalester Park, 1950)

The pastor/hero of Glenn Clark's postwar take on this theme is doing the main thing that makes this book the hardest to get through: he's preaching yet again. The phrase "Then aloud" is there because he's just noticed that three influential members of the high school football team are sitting in the front row, and he hopes he can make his point in a way that's truly relevant. I feel obliged to point out that, as hilarious as that third sentence is, Mr. Clark is in on the joke, making fun of a pastor who's trying a little too hard to make his sermon relevant and getting in over his head. I am sad to report, however, that Mr. Clark seems to think the first two sentences are just fine: the problem is getting lost in the cheesy metaphor, not trying a cheesy metaphor in the first place. So on a certain level, for Mr. Clark--who ran a lot of prayer camps and did a lot of youth ministry--Jesus really is "the key man who usually makes the touchdowns." Of course, Jesus-as-sports figure has a long absurd history in religious attempts to relate to kids, as this link painfully demonstrates.

Which brings us to our last sample:


“What would you like to know?”
“Well, mostly about your, uh, people. Just how retarded are they?”

--Marti Hefley, In His Steps Today, p. 123 (Hannibal, MO: Hannibal Books, 1987)

In this scene, Heather--the starring usually-viewpoint-character in the six-person Bible study in question--has become convicted about her somewhat empty suburban life, and is stepping out of her comfort zone and is on her first day as a volunteer for the local Home. (I tried to find the full name, but it was well hidden; it obviously tends to the needs of the mentally handicapped.) In Ms. Hefley's defense, the next line of dialogue is the staff worker telling Heather, "We don't use the word 'retarded' anymore." Which actually shows one of the nice things about the book: although the stakes are a helluva lot lower in her go-round (Sheldon envisioned changing all of Chicago; Hefley just wants six people to get a little more committed to their neighbors), she is also pleasantly willing to have her characters say and do stupid or unpleasant things. They snap at each other, they get tired and angry, and sometimes (as in this example) they actually risk offending the reader. Of course, every human weakness is quickly prayed away (a tradition that continues ad nauseam in the bazillion pages of the Left Behind series), but at least the characters feel real emotions. In Sheldon's original, everyone seems a bit like they're characters on a stage, and he's afraid to have any of them accidentally brush the set too hard.

Okay. I've officially spent way too much time on this. Back to my real writing!

BONUS: I can't resist. As an additional joke, I was carrying around this meme in my head yesterday when I went to the Red Hook Public Library, and I realized I had perfect fodder that might get some crushingly wordy or otherwise noisome writer to self-eviscerate. Alas, I couldn't find Finnegans Wake or Hegel or Kant, and Judith Krantz and Sophie Kinsella were both hit and miss. (I was hoping to find myself in the middle of a hilariously overwritten sex scene, but kept running across lines like, "All the way home, she thought about what Ben had said. Maybe it was true that Ken had lied, but surely he had his reasons. ZZZZZZZZ.") I was also hoping to find a favorite book and use that, but they didn't have Donald Antrim or Donald Barthelme either. (And I'm living out of a suitcase at the moment, so my favorite novels are back in Tucson in my brother's able care.) But then, just as I was despairing for this small-town library's meager holdings, I remembered Henry James! Here he is represented on page 123 of The Ambassadors, though any page would do:

With his genius in his eyes, his manners on his lips, his long career behind him and his honours and rewards all round, the great artist, in the course of a single sustained look and a few words of delight at receiving him, affected our friend as a dazzling prodigy of type. Strether had seen in museums—in Luxembourg, as well as, more reverently, in other days, in the New York of the billionaires—the work of his hand; knowing also that, after an earlier time in his native Rome, he had migrated, in mid-career, to Paris, where with a personal lustre almost violent, he shone in a constellation; all of which was more than enough to crown him, for his guest, with the light, with the romance of glory. Strether, in contact with that element as he had never yet so intimately been, had the consciousness of opening to it, for the happy instant, all the windows of his mind, of letting this rather gray interior drink if for once the sun of a clime not marked in his old geography.

Ah, Henry James. One day I hope to translate his works into English, but it's hard to stay awake.

Atheists Going to Church, and Other Forms of Happiness

Interesting article here about atheists who attend churches. (via Andrew Sullivan.) It doesn't say anything particularly mind-blowing, but it does strike at the ways in which religion can be a positive force in the world, and the importance of a community. As it happens, I'm already up on the actual importance of community because...

...I just finished reading The Geography of Bliss, in which NPR correspondent Eric Weiner (writing in a style much like Bill Bryson) journeys to the happiest places on earth (Iceland, Bhutan, Switzerland) as well as some unhappy ones (including the unhappiest: Moldova) and comes to several consistently interesting conclusions about happiness. I expected it was just going to be a travelog-ish lark, and I've found instead that my thinking has been altered. Highly recommended.

Okay. Back to more writing.

Book Stuff

Two things: First, you should know that I am now professionally constrained from making any detailed comments about the book I'm selling. There'll be plenty to hear about once we get a contract, but for now, expect radio silence. Second, MARY ROACH HAS A NEW BOOK OUT! You can keep your David Sedarises and Augusten Burroughses and whatnot: Mary Roach is, for my money at least, the funniest writer living today. (Someone tell Christopher Hitchens.) I suppose she's technically a science writer--and a very clear one at that--but she's also a character in her own explorations, commenting all the while on the funny names of the people she's meeting, the ironies that show up in their work, and adding copious footnotes with amusing details that aren't technically on topic, but show other weird things she came across in her research. We join her in every aspect of the journey, and she's a hilarious tour guide.

Her first book was Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers, where she brought morbid humor to the scientific study of death. Her second, Spook: Science Explores the Afterlife, shows the bizarre and creative lengths scientist have gone to in order to attempt to quantify the spirit world. They were both wonderful, and I recommended them to all my friends. But with her latest book--Bonk:The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex--she has found the best topic in her career so far. This is because the best arrow in her quiver is ironic understatement, and here, because she's writing (she says) a book about sex that her parents can read, the tension between what she's alluding to and what she's actually saying is all the more risible.

I realize I'm just telling you about the book. I should quote her. But I wouldn't be able to stop. (One side comment still stays with me: in discussing a certain procedure, Mary interrupts to say, "--again with the inserting of Pyrex tubes--" and it's like a perfect grace note on the whole description.) I could quote her all day, but I've got places to be and things to do. Just go and find it and open damn near any page. Or find it on Amazon and Search Inside. Here's how good it is: I read my friend Dan Kennedy's very funny memoir of his year as a befuddled rebel in the rock and roll business (Rock On, from Algonquin), and I actually laughed out loud four times. (I rarely laugh out loud, so when it happens I tend to keep track.) With Bonk, I have laughed out loud sixteen times, and I'm only halfway through. I haven't even finished the chapter where she talks about scientists in the twenties who thought it would be healthy for men to surgically implant a third testicle.

Read it. Trust me. Mary Roach is a gift to the art of the humorous essay. Plus, of course, you learn all kinds of stuff.

Books I Done Stole: The Rebellion of Lil Carrington by Mrs. L.T. Meade

I obtained The Rebellion of Lil Carrington in Jacksonville, and it may be the only warm memory I actually have of that city. It's not only the oldest book in my stolen-books collection (copyright 1898), but it has the following startling inscription on the inside:

If you can't read that, it says, "Bought with the first money I earned May 15 --1914 Mabel Wilson."

I don't know how old Mabel was in 1914, but if she was a preteen or teenaged girl, goodness knows she could have done worse, because Lil is quite the entertaining spitfire. At the start of the book, 15-year-old Lil's loving father has just died, and it looks as though she and her sister Sybil will be obliged to live until they come of age with their Aunt Julia, who is an uptight drip. (Julia also has, in the tradition of all such stories, an equally uptight daughter named Janet who's a total momma's girl, dresses like a frump, and needs only a wild, free-spending week in London to loosen her up.) Lil is a passionate girl, as shown in this early quote, where Lil introduces Julia.

"How hateful she is!" said Lil. "If there is anyone in this wide world I cordially detest it is my respected aunt, and next to her comes my dear cousin Janet. Oh, as to Uncle Hammond, he is all right, of course; he will allow us to have pretty much our own way in the future. I mean to twist him around my little finger--I have always done so." In the very next scene, Janet comes into the room, and Lil bodily lifts her and shoves her out into the hallway, slams the door, then says to her sister, "Janet is well at the right side of the door at last. Now don't let us think of her again." (Poor Janet, for her part, did nothing to deserve this except show up.) Then we meet Aunt Julia and discover the problem: Aunt Julia wants the girls to wear drab clothing, plaited hair (no curling!), and to be quiet and deferential at all times. When they get a letter from Uncle Hammond, Lil asks, "What's in the letter? Tell us! We're dying to know!" and Julia says, in essence, "How impertinent you are! I am not accustomed to being addressed in such a manner! Leave the table at once and think about what you've done." I mean, really. If this is the kind of life girls were expected to lead, Lil is my kind of rebel.

Lil actually runs off to London on her own to see their solicitor, who cannot help (Dad's will was quite clear), and then she rests her hopes in Uncle Hammond, who--unfortunately--is about to get married and then move to India (he's with the military), so he can't have children at the moment. And just as it looks like they're going to be stuck with Aunt Julia, Lil sends an SOS letter to two American girls she met in Chicago some time back: Patience Potter and her sister A. Mamie P. Potter. This is where the story kicks in: Patience and Mamie decide to rescue Lil by putting on an act: They come to visit for the entire month of August. Mamie, who is all of sixteen (and the eldest) is extravagantly, scandalously fashionable, changing clothes six times a day and hinting at a terrifyingly liberal lifestyle. (She's actually engaged, but she is forbidden by Aunt Julia to mention her fiance to anyone.) And Patience plays the total kiss-up, kicking even obedient Janet out of first place in Julia's affections. She always sits next to Aunt Julia, goggles at even the simple things she does, and loudly expresses her wish that Aunt Julia should be her mother.

The whole point of this is to soften Julia up so she'll let the kids have a week in London. It works, and three things happen: Janet comes along and actually loosens up a bit; Patience finds that, in sucking up to Julia, she actually comes to like Julia more than she expected; and Lil actually stops antagonizing people so much, since she has Patience to do the dirty work, and Mamie is taking all the heat for being rebellious. It's a smart story, and would make a not-bad Disney movie if they were shooting for a remake; it's very Parent-Trap-y, only it has the advantage of being actually plausible.

The only problem is that the book sort of ends abruptly. After coming home from London, Aunt Julia asks them all to write essays about what they saw and did--Westminster Abbey, the Tower, the various museums--and they're screwed because they didn't see anything at all: they just flounced around London shopping and going on picnics. So at the climax of the story, they decide to confess...and that's the end of the story. I was expecting a second wackiness to ensue ("Let's all get our stories straight; Lil, you broke your ankle...") or for some surprising turn from Julia ("I knew you were lying all along, but I love a good story!"). But no. They decide to do the apparently decent thing and fess up, and that's where the story ends. We don't even see the confessions, much less get a reaction shot. According to Wikipedia, "Mrs. L.T. Meade" wrote over 300 books. This may be the sort of thing that happens when you write that many novels; you let plot elements fall where they may and say, "Oh, did that just suck? I guess I'll fix that in one of my next fifty plots."

One final note: This is one of those old books that has a frontispiece illustration. And it reminded me that I've never quite understood the thinking behind those. I would expect that such illustrations--the chance, at the very beginning, to provide the book with its only picture--would be an opportunity to show off the best drama, the most vibrant happenings, the most important dialog. Instead what we get is this:

It says, "'Leave it to me, and now, my dear, I want to go into the house.'--P.108"

I would have preferred an exchange something like this, from p. 145:

"What a very queer name--Patience Potter!" murmured Janet.

"Yes it is queer," said Lil, "and so she is still queerer. She is the most fascinating, delightful, out-of-the common sort of girl in the world. She's American to her backbone--she hails from Chicago."

"I don't think mother would like you to say the word 'hails,'" said Janet.

I take back my earlier defense of her; I'm starting to think that I'd shove Janet too.

My Move, and unChristian by David Kinnaman

General News: I have just committed to a new apartment. It's not much different from my old one--it's one street-block away, so it's still in the same crappy, pre-gentrifying neighborhood I've lived in for the past year. But it has this advantage: I won't be a boarder in a rooming house, so I'll be able to store food, cook at will (much cheaper!), and have actually adequate room to store my things--as well as paying, aggregately, $20 less a month. I'll actually walk around like I own the damn place! The downsides: It's pretty ugly, and I literally do not know who my roommate might be (both current residents are moving out and I'm the first guy who showed up with money). Bonus upside: It's month to month, so I can leave if I have to. And the landlord seems like a decent guy. In the meantime, I think I'm going to buy a lot of wheeled crates and never unpack them. Seems like a wise way to live in Manhattan.

Another downside: This reduces me to almost nothing in the bank, and the deposit at my current week-to-week place was so paltry it won't actually help that much. Also, I found out that my next This American Life story has been pushed back until they can fill the hour with that theme. So I don't expect any huge influxes of money anytime soon. I'll be rebuilding my bank account from here through Christmas at least. Yuck.

How To Love God News: My friend Ryan sent me a link to this amazing New York Times article called "Evangelical Crackup," about the way rank-and-file evangelicals are apparently leaving politics in droves. (Registration required.) I'm not sure how I feel about it, though at ten pages it was definitely thorough. My own assumption is that the author is slightly overplaying the new direction of evangelicalism (it makes for a better narrative arc, after all), but he treats everyone pretty fairly--except for the last interviewee, a movement religious conservative who is all but painted with horns and fangs. My favorite quote comes just before the end where an interviewee says, "When you mix religion and politics, you get politics."

But though I think the article may be overstating things a bit, it's just as clear that some things about evangelicalism really are changing. I know this because a Barna study about evangelical Christianity showed that evangelicals have taken a sudden colossal drop in their reputation since 1996--really the first major change in overall religious attitudes since they started doing their work in the 80s. (If you don't know, George Barna is the evangelical Christian pollster, and his work is pretty reliable, though I take issue with his definition of "evangelical" in a section from my book.) The decline was so steep that one of their researchers, David Kinnaman, has written a book analyzing the data and suggesting what the church can do to improve matters. I bought it tonight, and though I can ill afford to be dropping $18 willy nilly these days, I'm glad I did.

The book is called unChristian (subtitle: What a New Generation Really Thinks About Christianity ... And Why It Matters), and in it Mr. Kinnaman discusses the top six criticisms leveled against the church by "outsiders" (non-Christians) age 16 to 29. These six criticisms are that Christians are:

1. antihomosexual (91 % said "a lot" or "some)
2. judgmental (87%)
3. too involved with politics (85%)
4. sheltered/ out of touch with reality (72%)
5. too focused on gaining converts, and
6. hypocritical

(Those last two items are summaries Kinnaman derives from statistics and statements elsewhere; the actual fifth and sixth ranked criticisms respondents could choose from were Old-Fashioned (78%) and Insensitive to Others (70%), with Boring (68%) and Not Accepting of Other Faiths (64%) bringing up the rear, though still with a huge plurality.)

I skimmed/read it on the subway home (advantage of a long commute) and it has encouraged me, yet again, that my nascent book has a place--because although Kinnaman is in many ways the opposite of "emergent church" liberals like Brian McLaren and Rob Bell, he's responding to the same problem: the fact that evangelicalism itself has a bad reputation and is starting to lose market share. (I hate to put it that way, but in the face of Kinnaman's own analyis--where he compares the "image" of Christianity to the "images" we have of Ford and Pepsi, worrying about Christianity's comparative loss of appeal to new converts--I could not do otherwise.)

And Kinnaman gets it wrong, the same way all the conservative evangelical reformers tend to get it wrong. In the section titled "Anti-Homosexual," for example, he says that Christians should change the perception "Christians show contempt for gays and lesbians" and replace it with "Christians show compassion and love for all people regardless of their lifestyle." Great idea! And just as Brian McLaren corrects the evangelical emphasis on hell by de-emphasizing it--and on homosexuality by preferring to focus on other things--Kinnaman suggests Christians deemphasize judgment and bring a message of grace. Again: sounds reasonable!

But the impossibility of the enterprise is established when the chapter self-destructs in its first two sentences:

"So David, do you still think I'm going to hell because I'm gay?"
My friend's question caught me off guard.

We know where this is going: 1. description of how much David likes his friend. 2. description of the traditional view of homosexuality (the Bible's agin' it!). 3. call for more compassion, with an example of how he, in this instance, responded with compassion rather than judgment to his friend. 4. ambivalent ending, pointing towards hope for the future...perhaps?

The problem--or at least one problem--is that the actual dynamic of God vs. homosexual still stands. In essence, the proper evangelical Christian answer to his friend's question is "No, my friend. Your sin is no different from my own tendency to be prideful and gluttonous. You're actually going to hell for so much more than just your mere homosexuality!" (Follow-up statement, "And believe me, I'm just as unworthy as you are, except that fortunately I'm going to heaven.") If that's what you're calling compassion, I invite you to reread the dictionary before you wonder why people won't come to your parties.

Kinnaman and other reform-minded evangelicals (including McLaren, though he's much closer to being helpful) will never fix evangelicalism as long as they fail to recognize that they're trying to square the circle: their judgmental, sheltered, anti-homosexuality is an inevitable result of the Biblical premises evangelicals are basically wedded to. You can't just add compassion on top and make people forget Sodom and Gomorrah. Until Kinnaman and others address the deeper issues--trying to improve their reading of the Bible's messages on sex, on hell, on homosexuality, and possibly on salvation in general--they'll be completely unable to change their old messages, no matter how much they want to polish the cover.

To put it another way: You know why outsiders think evangelicals are anti-homosexual? Because they totally are. You know why people think evangelicals are judgmental rather than loving? See the first question.

The good news is, if you look at Barna's other data (it's available on his website), you see some other changes as well: approximately 60% of evangelical Christians 16-29 aren't particularly exercised about living together before marriage. In a further left-leaning move, a similar number (I think it's around 54%) think Jesus' main message was about poverty. (Which, if you do the math--assuming that Jesus's main message was "what he's directly quoted as saying in the Gospels" and not "what Paul said in Jesus' name", turns out to be 100% true! How did we miss that?)

In other words, the younger evangelicals seem to be a little clearer about what aspects of a Bible-centered faith are central to Jesus's message, and which ones are rather more peripheral. (Even when I was an evangelical, it struck me as weird that evangelicals harped on, and loathed, homosexuality way more often than the Bible did.) And they're actually willing to change! That gives me hope. So the message of my book remains true: it's possible to rethink evangelical Christianity without completely unmooring it from the Bible (and, I should add, without turning it into the Unitarian liberal-fest that I personally prefer). But it's going to take a few harsher strokes than Kinnaman or even McLaren are currently willing to strike.

Books I Done Stole: The Corioli Affair by Mary Deasy

Book: The Corioli Affair, by Mary Deasy (1954)
Stolen From: Rudy's, a nightclub in Tallahassee, Florida. Their lobby is all ornamental books.

This book began in confusion for me. The first sentences are, "That winter I lived in Corioli, in a red-brick house on Longmill Street. There was a little shop on the ground floor where Nora Casey sold notions and candy, and above it a floor that was let to a family named Maher." It's clear that our heroine is Irish, and has been traveling, and for some reason I got it into my head that this was all taking place in Italy. It wasn't until page 12 that some character tells our heroine that she'll need "to study up on our American currency." I was stunned and went back, looking for any kind of sign, and that's when I realized that this book was curiously lacking in details for much of its length. For about thirty pages or so, this could have been taking place on a distant planet, out someplace dull.

Turns out it's actually 1884. Our heroine, lovely nineteen-year-old Lacey Dereen, has moved to Louisiana, or possibly Missouri, to find a life for herself in the wake of her father's death. This much we know by page three. She meets people and gets a teaching job, and befriends a couple, the Daytons--Jed and Sallie. (Sallie has a friend named Allie, which seems wholly unnecessary.) Jed is a taciturn riverboat captain, and his wife is a spoiled, temperamenal flibbertigibbet. Nothing happens.

I really mean this. By page fifty I was starting to yell at the book: "Hey, things! Why don't you occur? Or transpire! Give eventuating a shot!" She talks about Sallie to her housekeeper/family friend Mrs. Dandy. She talks about Mrs. Dandy to Sallie. She talks about both of them to Jed, who doesn't say much. And even at school, her kids are well-behaved and no challenges seem to present themselves. "Just wait," I told myself. "Things are building to something, surely." By page 107, when I read the sentence, "This was one more time that nothing had happened. I wondered how long it could go on that way," I was nodding in sympathy with the poor author, who was cleary in the same funk I was.

But things do build to something! The problem is, they finally occur on page 150, when there's only 100 pages to go. Apparently what's happened--and really the whole thing is a hazy wash of riverboats and crinoline--is that Jed Dayton and Lacey have fallen for each other. But he's married! And his wife won't give him a divorce! And I really can't pinpoint the source of this attraction, but the writer has taken care of that. (Jed: "This is impossible. Why are these feelings so strong?" Lacey: "I don't care. I only know that I love you!" QED.) The exciting thing on page 150 is that he suddenly quits town, leaves his wife, and meets Lacey on the q.t. back at Nora's place upriver, where she's fled to avoid the rumormongers. But then it turns out...Jed's ex Sallie has been found murdered!

"Aha!" I said. "So that's why we've spent so much time talking to Mrs. Dandy's nephew, who's a famously slick trial lawyer! And that also explains the occasional mumblings of characters who disapprove of tiny things and keep saying, 'There's going to be a riot one day!'" And that's the problem, of course: As soon as the plot was set in motion, I could see exactly where it was going, and the only real question was what would be the exact shape of the wreckage at the bottom of the hill.

I slogged through anyway, and I deserve some kind of medal. Here's a sample of Jed and Lacey on page 75, right after he suddenly declares his love and kisses her.

"No," I said again. "Oh, no. We can't."
"Yes," he said. "We can't. But we do. Don't talk. Don't say anything."
"I have to say it. Now. We can't let it happen."
"It has happened. There's nothing we can do about it."
"Nothing has happened."
"Nothing except that I'm in love with you. And you with me--"

What's there to say? Innocent Jed is accused of murder. Nephew Dayton tries his magic. Jed's found guilty instead of manslaughter. A mob, furious, takes matters into their own hands--but the raid on the jail, and the lynching, go a little awry when, in the worst coincidence I've read in some time, the lynchers somehow tear the window out of the third-floor jail cell (with ropes? Is it that easy?), and then, since they can't climb up, they switch plans and enter the jail proper. And while they're hammering down the cell bars, Jed, jumps out the now-open window. He cracks a few ribs, but survives and finds Lacey...but he needs a doctor. What will they do? Why, they'll hop on a riverboat, run into a squall, so that Jed can die a riverboat captain, saving the entire ship and lasting just long enough to hiss out his last loving cliche. ("I won't leave you...Not even if I die. They can make me die, but they can't make me leave you.") Cue the ponderous minor chord. The only interesting thing about the book is that on page 214, I read a sentence I will probably never see again: "He convolved his lips at me, whispering, almost without a sound: 'Where is he?'"

The back cover is interesting, though. It's in bad shape, like the front, but you can still make out the TV-era anxiety in it, since it's an essay titled "In Defense of the Novel" by Sterling North, some literary editor of the time. He spouts more cliches: "The novel will never die...while civilization endures...The novelist furnishes us a magic carpet...we can explore Paris with Balzac, Russia with Tolstoy...or raft down the Mississippi with Mark Twain." With hoary truisms like those, I'm not sure I'd trust his actual literary editing. But after reading The Corioli Affair, I can offer this rejoinder: If we rafted down the Mississippi with Mark Twain, and the raft just sat there for a hundred pages, even 50s-era TV would start to look pretty good. If I ever go back to Tallahassee, I'm going to put this back on the shelf.

Books I Done Stole: Unforbidden Fruit by Warner Fabian

(I finished the first chapter of How to Love God, despite chronic computer problems, but it'll take some organization before I can post part 2. Instead, here's the first in a planned series where I review all the rarely-read books I stole when I drove across the country two years ago:)


Book: Unforbidden Fruit by Warner Fabian (1928)
Stolen from: Actually, I purchased this for $1.50 from a used bookstore in St. Augustine, Florida. So maybe it shouldn't count, but it was about to be thrown out anyway, and at $1.50 it was certainly a steal to me.

A lurid title. A garish orange cover. Lettering that anticipates acid-rock posters by thirty-five years. A note on the inside under Mr. Fabian's name calling him "(Author of 'Flaming Youth,' 'Summer Bachelors,' etc.)" And then, before it even starts, we get the following "Forestallment":

Objection will be made at once by loyal alumnae of various institutions that "Unforbidden Fruit" is not representative of girls' college life as a whole. It is...not meant to be. I have deliberately chosen to present...girls of the modern, restless, experimental-minded, keen, cynical, adventurous and slightly neurotic type, pleasure-hunting and knowledge-hunting...living in the peculiar atmosphere of compressed femininity which produces an untellectual and social reaction not unlike the prison psychosis of our penal institutions. There is no doubt but that, in this environment, normal tendencies and appetites, including sex, become at times exaggerated and inflamed...

So before I had even met a single character, I'd fallen in love with the book five times. There is literally nothing to dislike. The only thing the novel could do now is renege on its early promise.

I'm tempted to say, "and it reneges with a vengeance," but that may be unfair. The book is from 1928, after all, and perhaps it was the height of salaciousness in that era to picture undergraduate girls as rude, trashy-mouthed smokers who discuss "necking" and are in constant violation of the Volstead Act.

We open at page 9, at the beginning of the school year, with the girls all lolling in the lounge, and by page 12 we have discovered that one of the characters is "lithe" (Sara La Lond, dark-haired and mysterious) and another is "tawny" (Starr Mowbray), as the girls sprawl in negligee, talking about how they spent the summer and what they plan for the year, saying things like "I never want to see a drink or a man or a nightclub again in my life," "What I heard about her not coming back, even the tabloids wouldn't print"--and, curiously, "Always beefing about sex complexes. They faire me a mal a l'estomac, that bunch." You can practically see the camera panning slowly as the author, barker for this particular sideshow, nudges you in the ribs and says, "Step right up, folks, and choose your favorite!"

But wait--on page 15, "with a single, lithe movement," Starr leaps to her feet. I thought Sara was the lithe one! How will we tell them apart? Relax. By the end of the chapter, the characters have divided themselves into fairly tidy types: Starr Mowbray is buxom, adventurous, and sloppy, and although she drifts in and out of litheness, she never stops being tawny. Her roommate, Sylvia Hartnett, is the Felix to her Oscar: Prim, Puritan, and mannered--but determined. While Starr is a committed virgin who necks with young men all up the coast and across two continents (there's a German officer looking for her, and he's presumably walking uncomfortably), Sylvia, also a virgin, nevertheless declares that she sees no point in getting all worked up and then not going through with it. When she goes, it'll be all the way. They are the two most popular girls in school.

The other two characters are Verity Chase, a dewy-eyed freshman whom the girls take on as a project, and Sara La Lond, the brilliant scholar with a dark past who spend a lot of time in her room upstairs, pacing late into the night. Although there's a promise of lots of raciness, really everyone has just one beau: Starr has her German cavalry officer, Verity falls for a hunky local boatman, Sara's tortured past is revealed (hint: she's not a virgin!) and Sylvia intrigues with young hot and popular Professor Patterson Gifford, a severe taskmaster about whom we are told that, when he discouraged gum-chewing in class, "[his] searing sardonicisms upon the subject of 'super-induced prognathism in the adolescent female jaw' had afforded vast delight to all the class..." So that's how you get laid.

But aside from the plot--which rambles happily from speakeasy to ballroom, with plenty of characters sneaking in and out of windows--the other real joy is the anachronisms. When the janitor tries to sneak a few girls out in his car, he "buttons the curtains" so no one can see inside. On one boring midsemester day, Starr and Verity pass the time by "hitch-hiking"...and Mr. Fabian helpfully explains what this radical new pastime is. A minor character turns up married, and when someone asks, "to Harvey?" the retort is, "Who did you think? Lucky Lindbergh?" And finally, there's this snippet from the night after Verity Chase tries out for a play and discovers she enjoys acting:

Upstairs, amid the steam of a potent perfume, [Verity] was gigglingly regaling her new friends with the delights of life under the bright lights, which, she wanted to tell 'em, was sure the Queen's beans!

The Queen's beans. That's this book clean through.